At least nobody can accuse the Tories of rushing to occupy the centre ground. Tony Blair cannot rely on his friends, whether they be Ken Follett or Tony Wright MP; but he can infallibly rely on William Hague to make himself more unelectable by the day. The opposition leader's position on the euro - that it is a threat to our way of life, so we should preserve our sturdy independence for the duration of one parliament - is a logical absurdity. His policy on taxation - that it should be reduced, while maintaining spending levels on the public services - is a recipe for inflationary disaster. Now he has revealed his thinking on education. As Francis Beckett reports on page 10, David Blunkett's latest ideas are dubious enough. Mr Hague's ideas are - there is no other word for it - barking.
The Tory leader starts from the presumption that it is possible to set schools free of bureaucracy by abolishing local education authorities. This is the mantra of all opposition politicians: knowing that promises to increase taxation will win no votes, and that promises to cut back on public services won't win any either, they fall back on the old cop-out of saving on "red-tape". But if schools have learnt anything over the past decade - in which local authorities have been reduced to shadows of their former selves - it is that local bureaucracy is simply replaced by Whitehall bureaucracy, more inflexible, more remote, more expensive, more oppressive. Schools use taxpayers' money; collectively, they have a statutory duty to educate all children. Somebody has to see to it that the money is properly spent and the duty discharged. It is known as democratic accountability, and if it is not done locally it must be done nationally. Once the most autonomous in Europe, English schools are now the most rigidly controlled. Teachers are in a state of near insurrection over the barrowloads of forms dumped on them by Whitehall (according to one survey, schools have received 377 regulations in the past three years); in rare unanimity, two of their unions have just launched a work-to-rule. Schools have been invaded by management-speak, with senior teachers more preoccupied by targets, mission statements and so on than they ever are by children. All this has been done, mostly by Tory ministers, in the name of setting schools free.
Mr Hague's vision, however, has a kind of crazy logic. He proposes, in effect, to remove all public accountability from schools, to do away with the idea of an education system entirely. All schools will be "Free Schools". Heads and governors would set pay rates, fix opening hours and term times, open or close sixth-forms, provide (or not provide) school transport and, most crucially, decide which pupils to admit and which to expel. They would potentially have all the freedoms of schools in the independent sector. Mr Hague promises the realisation of the middle-class dream: state-funded schools that can keep out the rough element and expel any that happen accidentally to creep in.
In his speech on 4 July, after much waffle about parental choice, he said: "Free Schools will be free to determine their own admissions policies, so that some of them can specialise in areas like art or science or sport or information technology. Some will wish to select 20 or 30 or 40 per cent of their intake, others will wish to be wholly selective." Thus, what was presented as freedom for parents to choose schools turns out to be freedom for schools to choose parents. A pecking order would emerge, with the schools at the bottom taking all the pupils left over once the others had done their selecting. We would have elite schools for the top 5 or 10 per cent at one end of the scale; lumpen schools for the socially excluded at the other. It would be far more iniquitous than the simple divide between grammars and secondary moderns. The 11-plus at least offered a kind of rough justice, whereby children throughout a council area took the same exam. Mr Hague would leave individual schools free to select on entirely arbitrary criteria, which might well include some assessment of parental "support", a polite term for picking out middle-class and aspirant working-class families.
The selective system was a disaster for the country, and we still live with the consequences. It wrote off three-quarters of our children at 11, and told them that they were worthless failures. It left Britain with the least skilled workforce in Europe and helped create a culture of lower-class alienation. To dream up something worse requires a perverse genius; Mr Hague has achieved it.
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